This title explores the work of three U.S. modernists of southern birth: William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty. Ladd explains that their influence is central to the project of reconstructing the Romantic ideology of authorship between World War I and the beginning of the Cold War. Concerned, in particular, with the modern woman in the scene of authorship, this book argues that ambitious women, both as subjects of modernist writing and writing subjects themselves, played a much larger role than yet acknowledged in defining U.S. literary modernism.